Reading is a wonderful and enjoyable experience and can be enjoyed by any age group. If you say you don’t like reading, you probably just haven’t found the right book yet and just need to keep searching. Even with the least enjoyable or poorly written books there is still something that you can take away from reading them. As readers we all enjoy different genres, or even a multitude of genres, along with the various categories that are under each genre and can lose several hours (or more) a day buried in a good book, whether that is fiction or non-fiction, science fiction or mystery, history or biography/autobiography.
When it comes to books and their different genres and categories, we have all heard the term “young adult” or probably more commonly “YA” when looking at books and may be slightly confused as to what this refers too. As the title suggests, these are books are aimed at teenagers, more specifically for readers between the ages of 12 to 18 years old, with a relatively new addition to the category called New Adult, aimed at readers from 16-25 years old. The YA category of books can feature any genre of books but generally include themes of high-stakes adventure, romance, sexuality, coming of age, melodrama, plenty of emotions coupled with teenage angst and even dystopian novels, they do have to keep the attention of a teenager after all. These books are excellent for helping to develop empathy and social understanding whilst looking at prejudice and discrimination and how to stand up to it, as well as being very interesting and enjoyable reads.
But YA titles can be enjoyed by adults as well, and it doesn’t matter if you are 12 or 100. With bestsellers like The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer and even J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the YA market has become a big hit with adult readers (with more than 50% of titles being bought and read by adults). Adults and young adults will find that there are some really good books to be read, including classics like To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Catcher in The Rye by J. D. Salinger or William Golding’s Lord of the Flies to newer and more recent titles such as Junk by Melvin Burgess, Aaru by David Meredith and the Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children series by Ransom Riggs.
So, YA Fiction is not just for a younger audience (in fact, I am willing to bet that a lot of adults have read and enjoyed a lot of YA titles without even realising it). Whilst the focus of a lot of books in this category may be on teenage characters and issues that they face, they do make very good and interesting reads for the adult market as well and should not be dismissed as just children’s books. They are interesting reads with some with good thought-provoking themes.
Here are ten titles that as an adult you might just love reading (some I have already read, some are on my to be read list):
 books are aimed at teenagers, so can adults enjoy them as well? YA titles are bought by as many adults as young adults.){kind=link}